Systems that seek to acquire very wide field of view (e.g. 360°) images are significant for a number of applications in both still and motion picture capturing and display. One such system employs a camera rotating around the horizontal of its focal plane used for capturing still panoramic photographs. Many images are taken, ranging from of the order of about 7 for consumer photographs to more than 100 for professional panoramas. The camera is typically mounted on a tripod, with the pan axis centered on the horizontal center of the focal plane. Parallax errors are reduced as the number of images is increased.
Sophisticated software has been recently developed that allows a consumer-quality panorama to be built from a series of handheld images. However, such techniques are based on panoramic still images, and cannot produce video panoramas since the product of exposure time and the number of images that must be taken exceeds the time per frame of a typical video sequence.
In other systems, a single camera coupled with a domed, spherical, or toroidal section mirror is used. The camera is usually mounted in such systems above the mirror so that the camera can see a e.g. 360° surround band around the mirror. The mirror may be placed on a conference room cable to provide a view of everyone sitting around a meeting table or may be plated on a tripod for panoramic landscape pictures.
In yet other systems, multiple mirrors and cameras are utilized to acquire the panoramic views. One such system uses 6 cameras looking down on mirrors arranged in a ring. The mirrors for this system consist of a 6-side pyramid, with different cameras looking down on each of the mirrors. The ring of cameras is supported by a post at the center of the pyramid of mirrors.